The Value of Employee Engagement Surveys

Motivation and Engagement

The Value of Employee Engagement Surveys as Part of a Change Management Strategy

Employee engagement surveys? Save your organization the time and the money.

Management Strategy

Instead, invest your time in a well thought out change management strategy.

This will ensure a climate where communication is open, ideas are valued and actions are implemented.

One of the things that continues to surprise me is that when times are bad organizations still spend money on employee engagement surveys.

Inspire Confidence

A general look around the office or factory and tea room discussions would make it obvious to all that wanted to see it that employees are not so much engaged as they are worried about their jobs.

This leads us to two major issues to consider during tough times, the first is how we inspire confidence and innovation in an organization that appears to be in freeze mode.

The second is what you should measure as an indicator of employee engagement.

Inspire Innovation

Let's deal with inspiring confidence and innovation in your organization.

Well, this boils down to a change management strategy that focuses on getting employees actively involved at all levels in understanding the business and how their ideas can have a positive impact.

Here's an example of what you could do

1. Share Data

Take real business data and share it with groups of employees at all levels that deal with customers in specific sectors.

2. Ask For Ideas

Ask employees for ideas on improving or innovating just one aspect of your service offering or product line and test in a specific market segment on a small scale, say a sales territory or state.

3. Examine Results

Then after testing those ideas for a six week period ask employees to examine the business results.

4. Implement Sucess

Take those ideas that have shown a substantial improvement in sales and implement either statewide or nationally depending on your organization.

5. Reward Program

Design a reward and recognition program around the impact of these ideas on the business outcomes and start to energise your workforce.

It really is that simple, treat employees with respect, stop telling them what to do.

Instead, listen to what they have to say, put some rigour around the framework for ideas and reward outstanding results.

This is how innovation happens and how you can energise an organization to respond quickly to changing market conditions.

Specific Activities

Another key is to ensure that whatever change management strategy you design it has specific activities and responsibilities for management.

Often we forget that managers are just as concerned during tough times about their job security, but their team members are looking at them for direction and support.

So when we design change strategies ensure that there are key responsibilities and clearly defined activities for all levels of the organization. So practically what does this mean with our example above?

Well you would design specific activities such as;

1. Identify Data

Managers would identify the real business data and share it with their teams.

2. Select Ideas

Managers would be responsible for selecting which ideas would be selected for testing in a specific market and they would decide which test market

3. Obtain Results

Managers would obtain the business results at the end of the six week test period and organise briefings with their teams

4. Implement

The hierarchy of managers would then decide which tests produced the best result and decide which to implement and project plan that implementation

5. Reward Program

Together with human resources the management team would decide on a reward and recognition program and share it with their teams.

So what about employee engagement surveys?

I say save your organization the tens of thousands of dollars they cost and invest your time in a well thought out change management strategy like that outlined above.

This will ensure a climate where communication is open, ideas are valued and actions are implemented.

Focused Workforce

All these steps are indicative of a workforce that is focussed, has a purpose and feels a greater level of confidence about the future of their organization and therefore their role because they are actively involved in designing the future, not being told what do and when to do it.

If you just change the paradigm from budget cuts, budget cuts and budget cuts to opportunities, growth and involvement, your organization's business results will be your barometer of employee engagement, no survey required.

This article was contributed by Kevin Dwyer Director of Change Factory.